How Does the Blend of Social Learning and Microlearning Boost the Overall Learning Uptake?

Organizations are striving towards excellence to stay ahead of the curve in today’s ever-evolving market conditions. They are competing for market share by leveraging the latest technologies, adopting new strategies and thinking innovatively. Also, the number of businesses operating from diverse demographics with a focus on improved employee engagement and workplace productivity is also increasing. In such instances, there is a huge scope to deliver effective e-learning solutions by blending social learning and microlearning strategies.

Social learning is associated with learning in groups or interacting via chats or forums across different social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. On the other hand, microlearning is the delivery of bite-sized content in the form of infographics, short quizzes and mini-games across personalized mobile devices. Organizations prefer combining social learning with microlearning to boost the overall learning uptake. New-age learners do not want to restrict themselves in monotonous classroom sessions which are boring. They prefer learning that which is easier, faster and self-paced. Few other reasons why their combination is an optimum choice are outlined here:

Social learning enables the learners to discuss content nuggets within quick time, talk about what they learn and boost everyone’s interest. The social learning aspect is combined with microlearning as a formal training method in which short and crisp learning modules are provided to the learners as defined learning paths to embrace the overall learning experience.

It is important to ensure that short content nuggets are in multiple formats such as videos, games, animations, graphics, scenarios and more. The different forms of micro content helps to boost the overall learner engagement and knowledge retention. To combine it with social learning, learners are asked to comment, share, like or vote on different nuggets across social platforms to improve their collaboration with others and the overall workplace efficiency.

Apart from creating the micro content, just-in-time job aids are also included during the workflow to address any specific issue, align to customized learning need or solve any specific problem. These learning aids motivate the learners to quickly apply what they have learned. Here, comes the role of social learning also, where learners are not asked to take assessments or retests. Instead, they are encouraged to ask questions about, why they failed to complete the training session. This helps to resolve their doubts, thereby leading to motivating the learners to perform better.

In addition to the above, social learning also helps the workforce to discuss on how they used different content chunks on the job. Both strategies impart a personalized learning experience as they do not happen in a fixed learning environment. With social learning, employees can suitably engage with small pieces of information, thereby ensuring learners do not feel isolated during the training program. When learners can freely interact with their peers on the social platform, they tend to perform better. They also take a greater interest in assignments when working in collaboration with others. To make it more effective, bite-sized learning is incorporated with different social learning elements such as chat, share, forum, comment and more. The combination of both these strategies has made it easier for modern organizations to smoothen the entire workplace training process and leverage the benefits of e-learning solutions more rapidly.

Suggested Further Reading: Two Good: Why Social Learning and Microlearning Make a Great Combination by Asha Pandey